No doubt about it, one of the biggest hurdles you face as a small business owner is managing your cash flow. A big part of this is ensuring your clients and customers pay your invoices on time.
Setting up email alerts to remind customers when your invoices are due is a great way to ensure you’re never – or at least, rarely – paid late, which we’ve written about on this blog and even cover in our MYOB training courses. Continue reading Get Paid Faster Using Your Mobile Phone!
There are lots of reasons why it’s a great time to start your own home-based business. I’ve talked about the perks of working from home before, for instance.
But perhaps one of the best reasons to start your own home-based business is that in today’s job market, it actually offers more job security.
Now, this may be pretty much the opposite of what nearly everyone else says about being self-employed, but bear with me. Continue reading The Great Compression Squeezes Out Home Based Businesses
Ever since EzyLearn’s early days, when we still had our training centres in Sydney, I’ve always gained a real buzz out of helping our students start their own businesses.
I still do, which is why I recently presented a seminar at the Reinvent Your Career Expo and why EzyLearn has partnered with the StartUp Academy.
The StartUp Academy is a start-up incubator for entrepreneurs who want to work in industries currently experiencing rapid growth — like the work health and safety industry, for example — but who also want to have balance in their home and work life; to be their own bosses. Continue reading You’ve Already Got a Business Coach – YOU!
We’ve published numerous posts about referral marketing, which is an invaluable and cost effective way of marketing your business. In particular, we talked about LinkedIn. This is something that I, Steve Slisar, CEO of EzyLearn, am a big believer in — and so is small business marketing guru, Michael Griffiths.
You can learn more about using LinkedIn for referral marketing by attending one of Michael’s Sydney workshops and here’s a company willing to pay a good commission for referrals. Continue reading Want to Earn a Thousand Bucks for Giving a Referral?
In a recent post we talked about how you can use referral marketing and LinkedIn to market your business to grow your customer base. But once you get those new customers, the most important thing is making certain you keep them.
Great customer service is the key to ensuring you always have a happy customer. Providing consistently good customer service and being courteous to people in the way you communicate with them, be they suppliers or contractors, as well as customers, is also highly beneficial to your business in other ways. Continue reading Thanks For Loving Us
With the arrival of cloud-accounting software came the opportunity for old foes and new players to enter the accounting space, once dominated by MYOB.
We offer training courses in MYOB, because it’s still the most widely used software package by accountants, but we’ve also recently expanded our cloud-accounting courses to also include Reach Accounting and Xero; two new players to enter the accounting fray. Continue reading Is QuickBooks Taking on MYOB Online?
In running our Small Business Management Course and MYOB Training Courses, one of most common reasons we find that people want to start their own businesses is to be their own boss and work remotely from home.
This is a perfectly understandable sentiment — but it’s not necessarily conducive to making a small business work.
Entrepreneurs are known to be people who manage starting up and/or bringing to fruition their own businesses and ventures, but entrepreneurs are a certain breed and as many find out the hard way, self-employment is not for everyone. Continue reading So You Think You Can Be an Entrepreneur?
In the marketing module of our Small Business Management course, our students learn about marketing action plans, and throughout the course come to create their own marketing plan for their soon-to-be business.
We also talked about referral marketing and networking in our last post, in which we outlined what every business should be doing to grow their customer base. For this reason, it should also be included in your marketing action plan. Continue reading But Networking Isn’t Making Me Any Money! Putting Together a Marketing Action Plan
We recently wrote a post about referral marketing and how it can genuinely grow your business. We talk about different marketing strategies in our Small Business Management course, and particularly the different mediums – newspapers, online, etc – that you can use to advertise your business, but referral marketing is one marketing strategy that doesn’t cost a lot and that you can – and should! – begin today. Continue reading Pimp My Business: Networking How-To’s and an Apple Case Study
Marketing and referrals are essential components of any successful business. We cover marketing in the Marketing Action Plan and Undertake Marketing Activities of our Small Business Management Course, where we talk about the ways you can market your business to get those first few customers.
Referral marketing is a great way to gain new customers, and involves encouraging your existing client base to promote your business and its services.
In our Small Business Management Course, you learn all about starting and managing a small business. One thing we don’t teach, however, is customer service.
In fact, it’s often said that the golden rule of customer service is that the customer is always right, even when they’re wrong.
But what happens with your suppliers, when you’re technically the customer — does this give you free reign to be as demanding as you like? Or does it pay to be nice? Continue reading Do You Really Need to Be Nice in Business?
A short while back we wrote a post about why your final price should include GST, and just recently we talked about how you should structure your prices, so we thought we would add to these and talk about whether you should make your prices freely available on your website.
The internet has changed the way we do many things. It’s changed the way we bank, communicate and work, but if there’s one thing it’s almost entirely revolutionised it’s the way we shop — particularly the way we shop for professional services. Continue reading Pricing: Are You Being a Con Artist Without Knowing It?
We’ve spoken about working for free before. In one post about setting prices we discussed why you should outline the free work that you do as ‘added value’, but if that’s still not working, maybe you should consider working for free.
This may sound counterintuitive, since you’re trying to get paying customers and now we’re telling you to give your services away for free, but stay with us. Continue reading Am I Better Off Doing Some Work for Free or Discounting My Rates?
We were recently surveying our PayPal account and discovered that you can now invoice customers directly using PayPal. While it doesn’t eradicate the need for a good piece of accounting software, this facility makes it very easy for people to get started in business — particularly businesses with very few expenses. Continue reading Invoice Your Customers Directly Using PayPal
We mentioned in a previous post about how our MYOB Training Courses are like an induction to the role of bookkeeper and how we provide all our students with workbooks and training resources to compliment our training video content and other online learning tools. Continue reading MYOB Training Courses: Lifetime Access Guaranteed
In our Small Business Management Course there is a module on determining and setting your prices, which includes factoring in things like travel expenses if you’re going to be visiting clients and so forth.
But what about things like, installation costs – should you bill your clients for this or work it into the price or just let it slide?
Some businesses work those sorts of prices into their final cost; others – think Foxtel, for example – charge installation fees; but a surprising number of businesses let it slide. Continue reading When Should You Work for Free?
